


Welcome Home

by ThatwasJustaDream



Series: Feb 2017 'Celebrations' Bingo Card [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: First Time, M/M, S4e21 Coda, post-Afghanistan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 23:24:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9851567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatwasJustaDream/pseuds/ThatwasJustaDream
Summary: The trip home from Afghanistan ends with Steve and Danny stumbling up Steve's stairs, exhausted, and straight into Steve's bed.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a bingo on the 1_million_words comm. The prompt was "Welcome Home". It's a head canon of mine that Steve and Danny got together immediately after the events in Afghanistan. I'm still not so sure they didn't in canon (kidding, mostly, not - it would explain a lot, wouldn't it?). But this is my AU version of that happening.
> 
> Rated M for some frottage, F bombs and brief descriptions of the violent death Steve almost suffered.

_“Welcome home….”_

Danny murmurs it low under his breath against Steve’s neck; wrapped around him chest to chest in what has gone, in a matter of seconds, from being Steve’s bed to being their bed. As much as Steve is unsure of everything else in the world, he knows it’s true: No one but Danny is ever sliding in here with him again.

And they haven’t even fucked yet. 

“Thanks, babe…” Steve says it back to him, because Danny deserves that.

_I’m not home. Not yet. Not really._

He doesn’t say that part – not out loud. Physically he is, of course, but mentally?

After Danny put his foot down and refused to leave Steve’s bedside, the military shipped the two of them out as fast as threatened; first a plane to a base in Germany, then a ticket on a commercial carrier to New York. Steve wasn’t ready for either of those trips, not even close to physically ready but he’d gritted his teeth and dealt with it.

They’d paid their own way the rest of the way: Hawaiian Airlines, the ten a.m. flight to Honolulu. It landed at 2:39 p.m. Hawaii time, and they pulled up to Steve’s house in a cab barely forty minutes later; tossing Danny’s bag on the way up the stairs, losing their clothes on his bedroom floor with zero regard for or interest in where they fell.

Getting under the sheets; too exhausted from almost seventy-two straight hours in motion to do anything but hold onto and relax into each other.

“It’s okay,” Danny said, now. 

“What is?”

“That you’re still…significantly freaked out. I know you are. You don’t have to pretend you’re all right, or apologize for it.”

“You shouldn’t have to go through this with me,” Steve tells him. “I’ve put you through… enough. You probably…should have gone home. But I’m glad you didn’t.”

His captors had been seconds from tearing him apart - nothing figurative about those words. It’s what had sent the ‘fight or flight’ coursing through him, giving him that one last burst of energy. If it had gone differently?

It had come so close to happening… so close…that Steve’s been having nightmares it actually did: Picturing his body in pieces, hacked to death and no longer human, really. Seeing it from above, like some out –of-decimated-body experience.

There have been moments on the trip home that he’s wondered if he really is dead: If all the misery of getting from plane to plane and flying with a deeply contused body hasn’t been some hapless foundering of his soul through a kind of purgatory. 

Which is…nuts, really. Batshit crazy. But….

It had been so close.

“You had nightmares during our overnight at Bamberg,” Danny tells him, now – as much to let Steve know that he knows as anything. “You were… all over the bed, tossing around like a flounder. Not that I’m even sure that’s abnormal for you, yet, but…it didn’t feel right. And on the plane to New York - it’s why I gave you a jostle, babe…I was afraid you were gonna jump up and tackle a flight attendant if I didn’t, so…yeah, I know. And I _do_ need to be here. There’s literally no place else for me to be. I also…. have to say something you might not like.”

Danny was on his back, fingers rubbing his eyes like he was formulating precisely how to say it.

“What? It’s okay…what?”

“This is not a knock on her. Or a cheap shot at her. And if it comes off like it is, I’m sorry but… I have to …I have to say it.”

“It’s okay, Danno. I’m too exhausted to get mad.”

“I will never leave you hanging out to dry like that. I know you’re gonna try and tell me she had her reasons, but… fuck that. She had options; ways she could have stuck with you and kept looking for…… but no. So…. fuck her.”

They were both quiet for a minute, the only sound the waves outside and the breeze making Steve’s blinds sway and tap at the windowsill.

“I think I was chasing after her… if I ever _was_ really chasing after her… because she seemed like my last stab at… normal,” Steve said. “At what everybody has. Or wants.”

“What do you want?” Danny asks him. “What do _you_ want, right now?”

“I want us to try. I think we should try being together. Don’t you?”

“Hell, yes,” Danny leans up over him. “Good thinking...”

Danny’s leaning in to kiss him and part of Steve wants to say ‘no, wait…’ 

As in wait until we’re rested and awake; showered and shaved, not rough-skinned, wounded and travel weary. But…no. Fuck that, too; screw waiting.

Danny tastes like the coffee they both drank right before the plane landed; feels so right, the press of his lips and the slide of his tongue. The way he takes control of the kiss; rolls them so he’s half under Steve, an arm wandering up Steve’s back to cup his neck, fingers reaching to tug and stroke at the ends of his hair.

There’s no keeping it to a kiss; briefs are pulled down and then away; each of them pulling the other in, finding the right angle and tangle of legs and arms and rocking instinctively. It’s a slow climb, with them both so tired – but over too soon. Danny falls off the cliff first with a short, strangled sound against Steve’s neck, hips bucking, and that’s all it takes before Steve feels himself losing it, too- silent except for a long, harsh, deeply relieved exhale.

“Hold that thought,” Danny says, getting up after a few seconds flat and entwined.

Steve wants to get up, too – to jump in the shower with him, feel the hot water on his skin but he can’t. His tank is past empty.

_“Welcome …home…”_

He whispers it to Danny once they’re clean and warm, Danny back from doing the honors and both of them settled under the sheets.

Steve feels Danny's contented chuckle at the words even as he’s falling asleep, and knows that Danny gets it: He didn’t only say it in order to return the kindness.

He meant it in more ways than one.


End file.
